The Hindu Business Line : Single and homeless

It's very difficult to adjust to hostel life once you graduate — loud music, common rooms and no privacy. A flat is better, but only if you have good flat mates.

It's the best of times and worst of times — for young Indian women at least. A large number of them have finally reached a stage where they can do more with their lives and degrees than learn how to cook the perfect dal, drape a perfect sari and wait for the perfect man to come along and change their lives. However, as thousands of girls move away from their homes to get jobs and fend for themselves, getting accommodation has become a big hassle. Actually, most young women find it easier to get a good job than a roof over their heads. Those who are single, face sheer hell.

In the last few years, though there has been an explosion in the number of women moving to big cities to work, hostels and other forms of accommodation have hardly kept pace. The primary problem is there are too few decent women's hostels, and too many students and working women looking for housing. Most of the country's well-established hostels have long waiting lists and getting a room in any of them is next to impossible, unless you have contacts in high places and can pull some strings.

A hostel owner in Chennai, for example, talks of having to turn away an average of five girls a day. Arti Thukral, who works for a private bank, says getting into a Mumbai hostel is as tough as getting admission into a school or college. "There are forms to be filled, followed by interviews and only then formal admission."

The fact that job profiles have changed dramatically over the past couple of years hasn't made things easier. Most hostels insist on locking their gates between 6-30 p.m. and 11 p.m., deadlines that women working in professions such as media, advertising and call centres, for example, find impossible to keep. Nagina Vijayan, a media professional based in Kochi, says she chose paying guest (PG) accommodation because, "though hostels are more economical and safe, they do not meet the requirements of new age professionals. For example, the YWCA, considered the best hostel in Kochi, closes its doors by 7 p.m.," she says.

People who let out rooms to paying guests are rarely more accommodating, and, more often than not, landlords are supremely suspicious of single, young women looking for homes. Naina Bhagdev, a Gujarati who works in Mumbai, is a typical example of the many women who fall into the `single, female and generally homeless' category — a whole new genre of desperate house hunters.

"You have really touched a sore spot," she explodes, when asked about living single in what's generally considered India's most cosmopolitan city. "I've been in Mumbai for nine years now and I've tried everything — hostels, PGs, rented apartments." Naina first lived in a hostel for students, but left as soon as possible, because of the many rules and restrictions. "Every time I spent a night away from hostel, I had to record where I would be staying in a log book, along with the name, address and telephone number of my host," she says. Because of the rigid deadlines, girls often end up taking `night-outs' whenever they want to go partying, and return to the hostel at 6 a.m., when the gates reopened.

"We would go and sit at the Gateway of India, or at a 24-hour coffee shop once the disco closed because the gates only reopened by 6 a.m.," says one young woman, who used to go dancing with friends from the hostel after they all signed out stating that they were going to their respective guardians' houses.

In Chennai's hostels too, the scene is very similar — except that the girls head to the beach after their parties and wait for sunrise. "Don't hostel wardens realise that these strict deadlines don't work today? In fact, they end up being even more detrimental. If they were more understanding, we would be more honest," says one young lady indignantly, adding, "And it's not like we go partying all the time. Most of the times we're late because we couldn't leave office on time."

Strong-man allergy

Another common hostel phenomenon is what the girls call "a strong man-allergy." While there are hostels that actively crusade against male visitors and phone calls from men, most are content with playing moral police. "My hostel was so anti-men that if the warden ever saw you talking to a guy you'd be fined Rs 100. And I stayed there for five years!" says Naina.

Sreebala Menon, a programme producer at the Centre for Development of Imaging and Technology in Thiruvananthapuram, who has been living on her own since college says she moved out of thostel because of the 10 p.m.-lights-out policy, the "inconsumable food" served and the fact that "people who run hostels are under the misconception that they are the guardians of the morality of their women residents, especially in Kerala."

On top of all this, most of the hostels springing up all over the metropolitan cities today are little more than "expensive pigeon holeshe run by people out to make a quick buck from our housing problems," says one disgruntled home-hunter.

When Aparna Moorthy landed a fancy job in a private firm in Chennai, her employers gave her exactly a week to join duty. Having lived at home in Erode all her life, with very few relatives in Chennai, an anxious Aparna desperately called everyone she knew in the city for help with accommodation and finally found a hostel. With only three days to go, she landed armed with bag and baggage, only to find her new home was just a small dingy room crammed with a row of steel cots. There were no cupboards, and the girls were expected to permanently live out of suitcases.

Just when it looked like things could not get any worse, the hostel warden informed her that the deadline was 6.30 p.m. and that if she was ever held up at the office she would be expected to "produce a letter duly signed by your chief" and that too would be allowed only thrice a month. Since Aparna's new job involved long hours at work, she had no choice but to pick up her bags and trudge around the city again looking for a place to stay. Fortunately, she managed to find a woman willing to take her on as a paying guest, just one day before her new job began.

Become somebody's guest!

Aparna was lucky. Finding good PG accommodation can be next to impossible, according to all the women interviewed across the country for this story. Staying at a stranger's house can be a complete gamble, and depending on how lucky (or unlucky) you are, you can either land up with a fabulous landlady who pampers you, or people who are at the best narrow-minded and eccentric and at the worst plain peculiar.

One young woman from Chennai who moved to Bangalore for her first job was thrilled when she found a PG accommodation close to her new office. She was given a room to share with another girl. The downside? The room turned out to be a converted garage, and the landlord and lady kept a key to it, so they could show it off to other prospective house hunters. In a couple of months they leased this garage to a couple, she was moved upstairs, and then she found her roommates began to rapidly multiply. "It was like living with gremlins," she says, adding that to make things worse, "the daughter of the couple was a kleptomaniac and kept walking around in my clothes insisting that they were hers!"

Then, there's the jinxed student from Mumbai who had an extremely obsessive landlady who kept inventing rules and justifying them by calling her parents and saying, "She's reaching a marriageable age. We should be more careful now than ever before of her reputation and behaviour. The answer is strict rules and regulations." She was out of there in two months. Her next stint was with an elderly woman who was paralysed. "When I got back from business school she would be all alone and would keep asking me to run errands for her. In the beginning I did it out of sympathy but then the pattern got on to me and I couldn't take it any longer. I lasted there for a month."

However, there are also plenty of women who choose to stay as PGs because of the convenience it offers. Nagina from Kerala says she chose to be a PG because of her erratic work schedule. "If you build up trust with the family you are staying with, they are flexible about the timings. I get home-cooked food, my own private room and can use common amenities like the TV and kitchen, so it's like being part of a family."

She adds that with so many young people moving abroad, elderly couples in Kerala are increasingly letting out rooms to paying guests, perhaps in a bid to beat the empty nest syndrome. Roshini Raghavan, a journalist in Mumbai, agrees. "In some places, paying guests are treated almost like daughters, and typically, these are families that have a room to spare after the children have moved out, so there are no youngsters in the house," she says.

Software engineer Bhuvana Mahadevan, from Chennai, describes her septuagenarian landlady Shanta Krishnaswamy as a `perfect hostess'. "She is an excellent cook, and takes great care of us." Ask Shanta about her brood of PGs and she says, "I don't like to call them paying guests. They are like my children. I don't expect anything — no rules and regulations — except affection from them. I am willing to give them all the love and warmth to make them feel at home. In fact, I would like them to forget that they are living away from home. In return, I only want them to reciprocate my feelings."

A flat, all for yourself!

If you can't take hostel life, and want total independence — something that even the best PG accommodation doesn't offer — the final option is to rent a flat. Since most young, single women cannot afford the inevitable steep rents and "killer deposits," which average around Rs 40,000 — about four months' rent — they usually look for roommates. This way, in a three-bedroom flat, each woman gets a room to herself and they split the rent three ways. To make it cheaper, they just have to take on a couple more roommates, and divide the rent accordingly.

The problem? Finding a flat, and even tougher... finding roommates. In Kerala, one frustrated house hunter says she had to settle for PG because "landlords think it's risky to rent out the flat to an unmarried girl as instances of prostitution are very high in the State."

Thirty-four-year-old Vandana Gombar, a senior journalist who moved to Hyderabad from Delhi, also had problems simply because she was single. "Many people were wary... mostly because of my marital status and also because of my profession. I met an old couple who said they `wouldn't feel secure with me'," she says.

Vanaja Jayakumar, who holds a middle-level managerial position in a private company in Chennai, tried to find a flat for months — unsuccessfully. "When I said I'm single, one landlord even said: "Sorry, we don't rent the house to your type," she says. Did she ever find a house? Yes. After she brought her mother to the city.

"We are not against single people — men or women," says a flat owner in Kolkata. "Our problem is that if we rent our house to these women, they have to really abide by the rules and regulations that we (the association of flat owners in the building) put forth. We are very strict about one thing — that members of the opposite sex not be let in while they live in our flat. It is to safeguard not only our interests, but theirs too."

He adds that if there was a problem, "it would not only affect our reputation, but the reputation of the apartment complex as well. We have seen that such problems can even affect real estate prospects as the house will be branded."

Special rules and regulations formulated just for single tenants can be very frustrating. Sreebala, for example, had problems with the security guard in her Thiruvananthapuram apartment. He refused to let in visitors, using abusive language and even physically restraining some of them. She was told that she could not have any friends visiting her, only relatives. Then, the president of the residents' association decided to implement a new rule where a register was maintained to record the name of each of her visitors. The reason they gave was that all these measures were to protect her since she was "single and young". However, Sreebala differs. "Because of my profession, I need to meet many people. And I consider such `special' rules an intrusion into my privacy," she says.

Neighbours and domestic help also get into the act in most apartments. "Every time I come back late with a guy, the security guard misbehaves. If the neighbours spot me, there are disapproving glares and bad vibes," says a woman from Mumbai. "There is always this feeling that I had better not be spotted coming late by anyone from the building, thus I'm forced to descend to a level of sneakiness to protect myself, even though I'm not doing anything wrong by bringing friends home for dinner," she says, adding that she had a friend who was living with her boyfriend. The week she moved in, the servant quit work, refusing to work for such `immoral people'."

Maya Rangarajan, who moved from Chennai to Bangalore and then to Delhi over a span of two years, says that she found renting a flat the best option. "It's very difficult to adjust to hostel life once you graduate — loud music, common rooms and no privacy," she says. "A flat is much better — but only if you have good flat mates." Her friend Ruchi had a bad experience on this front."I had a lousy year in a flat that I shared with four girls. I was sharing a bedroom with one, but I ended up spending most of my time sitting in a stuffy hall because she would go into our room with her boyfriend," she says.

Maya had one of her worst experiences when she shared a flat with three girls in Delhi. They were increasingly difficult, but the last straw was when two of her roommates attacked each other physically. "It was so weird," she giggles, "They fought over water — one claimed that the other was having too many baths — and they actually began beating each other up in the living room. I moved out the next day."

(Some of the names have been changed)

Picture by A. Roy Chowdhury

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